This research explores the relationship between deafness, sign language experience, and attention in linguistic form and motion perception, with the aim of providing new information about the level of attention required for visual language perception in an understudied population, deaf people who rely on signed languages as their primary form of communication. Current theories of visual attention propose that during visual perception, scenes are first scanned rapidly by pre-attentive mechanisms that assess category membership of objects in the scene so that focused attention can be efficiently guided to the objects of greatest relevance. The current studies use the visual search paradigm to assess whether this is true of deaf signers viewing linguistic form and movement contrasts. Search times for sign language targets situated among across- and within-category linguistic distractors are compared for deaf signers, hearing signers, and hearing non-signers to determine whether linguistic category boundaries are available pre-attentively, and to isolate the source of any population differences to auditory deprivation or sign language experience. Results will enrich our understanding of visual language processing in the deaf.